The Cultural Contradictions Of Techbro Capitalism

Andrew Gelman has read Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which sounds like a very interesting book by a New Zealand lawyer who climbed high in the ranks at Facebook, before becoming too disgusted to keep going (Per a comment to Gelman’s post she’s prohibited by court order from promoting the book, which sounds like another interesting story in and of itself).

Gelman has some interesting thoughts of his own about what I guess could be called the plutocratic precariat, that may help explain something I’ve puzzled and puzzled over, like the Grinch on the summit of Mt. Crumpet, which is why are these people so utterly obsessive about constantly expanding their already uncountable wealth up until the very last day of their wretched lives? (I’ve mentioned Keynes’s observation nearly 100 years ago now that this is obviously a serious form of mental illness, that we tolerate because it is so useful for creating capital accumulation, but will be treated with disgust and pity upon entrance into the post-scarcity promised land, which Keynes figured would be somewhere around 2030 or thereabouts).

Gelman:

The trajectory of Facebook gives me some insight into the inherent incoherence of the ideology of market-leading tech companies. I have the impression that their ideology has three components:

1. The company was founded from a combination of inspiration, brilliance, hard work, ruthlessness, and luck. The right people at the right time putting in all nighters and refusing to take no for an answer. The startup is the creative mammal thriving beneath the notice of the lumbering dinosaurs.

2. As the company gets big, it needs to avoid becoming one of those dinosaurs. So it should never lose its startup habits: openness to wild new ideas, thinking big, willingness to work long hours, and commitment to the cause. The challenge is to stay young and hungry even while the company is becoming middle-aged and fat.

3. The goal is 20% annual growth forever, or until the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

OK, you can see some contradictions here! On one hand, the storyline is that you’re gonna get overtaken by hungry young newcomers; on the other hand, you’re supposed to stay on top forever. The result, at least for Facebook, seems to have been a kind of desperation, a sense that on one hand they are the kings of the world and that on the other hand they are destined to fail and so they have to try harder and harder to grow and grow and preserve a near-monopoly status. And that’s how you get these executives who control unimaginable fortunes and yet are willing to lie and cheat (I wanted to say “lie, cheat, and steal,” but I don’t know if there was any actual stealing reported in that book), indeed they seem to feel that they have to like and cheat and manipulate the rules and all of this to stay on top.

This is where I feel like their ideology is killing them. Yeah, it’s good that they recognize that as businesspeople they’re nothing special–they just happened to be in the right place at the right time–and it’s good that they recognize that a company has a natural life cycle and you can’t stay on top forever. The bad thing here is that it gives them such a sense of existential insecurity that they feel that they have to keep reinventing themselves and their businesses. They seem to feel a kind of duty to keep the growth going, even while they recognize that there’s no reason they shouldn’t be supplanted by the new generation, and that motivates them to do bad things.

Again, I think they’d be better off if they weren’t able to change the rules in this way–they’d be better off if they were just selling widgets and following the usual corporate playbook. This growth-or-die attitude is just ruining these people.

I really hadn’t thought about it, but this makes all kinds of sense. The smarter/less delusional members of the techbro set can perceive that they’re not magically immune from all those gusts of creative destruction that they’ve spent their lives worshiping while furiously flapping their butterfly wings to try to bring about yet more technological hurricanes. The politically canny subset of that group knows a thing or two of what happens when you conjure up enough creative destruction to eventually get people who don’t happen to share your messianic faith in the Market and Technology mad enough to do something about it, besides trying to pass DOA antitrust legislation and the like.

A related thought: A big lacuna in American political discourse is the absence of the classic idea that the rentier class consists of a bunch of social parasites, who collectively are about as useful as fleas on a dog. The evident fact that an enormous percentage of the plutocracy’s actual membership consists of people who do literally nothing but consume social resources at a decadent and depraved rate, while contributing nothing to society themselves, is something that the American class structure does a remarkable job of concealing from hundreds of millions of people who appear to believe quite sincerely that the ultra-rich are who they are because of a combination of their native talents and their commitment to “hard work.”

The media obsession with highly uncharacteristic figures like Zuckerberg and Bezos — uncharacteristic in that they are genuinely robber barons, as opposed to the inheritors of wealth uncountable — helps disguise, and not by accident, that they are so uncharacteristic of their economic class. It needs to be repeated often that the vast majority of the people populating our plutocracy do literally no work whatsoever, that their “careers” if any are simply financial Potemkin villages designed to hide that they live off almost always unearned capital — if I had a dollar for every “consultant” “working” on his MacBook in a Boulder cafe while drawing his dividends I wouldn’t have to work for Farley and Lemieux — and that they belong to a social class that, for reasons flowing from a delightful confluence of considerations of social justice and economic efficiency, ought to be taxed, regulated, and criminalized out of existence altogether.

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